English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  Stanley looked down at my father now. “Mac, you double sure it’d be okay?”

  Even I was able to translate that. What was my father going to face from my mother for sending me off camptending into the mountains with Stanley for a number of days?

  “Sure,” my father stated, as if doubt wasn’t worth wrinkling the brain for. “Bring him back when he’s dried out behind the ears.”

  “Well, then.” The brown Stetson tipped up maybe two inches, and Stanley swung a slow look around at the pines and the trail and the mountainslope as if this was a site he might want to remember. More of his face showed. Dark eyes, blue-black. Into the corners of them, a lot of routes of squint wrinkles. Thin thrifty nose. Thrift of line at the mouth and chin, too. A face with no waste to it. In fact, a little worn down by use was the impression it gave. “I guess we ought to be getting,” Stanley proposed. “Got everything you need, Jick?”

  I had no idea in hell what I needed for going off into the Rocky Mountains with a one-handed campjack. I mean, I was wearing my slicker coat, my bedroll was behind my saddle, my head was more or less on my shoulders despite the jolt of surprise that all of this had sent through me, but were those nearly enough? Anyway, I managed to blurt:

  “I guess so.”

  Stanley delivered my father the longest gaze he had yet. “See you in church, Mac,” he said, then nudged the sorrel into motion.

  The black pack horse and the light gray ugly one had passed us by the time I swung onto Pony, and my father was standing with his thumbs in his pockets, looking at the series of three horse rumps and the back of Stanley Meixell, as I reined around onto the trail. I stopped beside my father long enough to see if he was going to offer any explanation, or instructions, or edification of any damn sort at all. His face, still full of that decision, said he wasn’t. All I got from him was: “Jick, he’s worth knowing.”

  “But I already know him.”

  No response to that. None in prospect. The hell with it. I rode past my father and muttered as I did: “Don’t forget to do the diary.”

  “Thanks for reminding me,” my father said, poker-faced. “I’ll give it my utmost.”

  • • •

  The Busby brothers, I knew, ran three bands of sheep on their forest allotment, which stretched beneath the cliff face of Roman Reef. Stanley had slowed beyond the first bend of the trail for me to catch up, or maybe to make sure I actually was coming along on this grand tour of sheepherders.

  “Which camp do we head for first?” I called ahead to him.

  “Canada Dan’s, he’s the closest. About under that promontory in the reef is where his wagon is. If we sift right along for the next couple hours or so we’ll be there.” Stanley and the sorrel were on the move again, in that easy style longtime riders and their accustomed horses have. One instant you see the pair of them standing and the next you see them in motion together, and there’s been no rigamarole in between. Stopped and now going, that’s all. But Stanley did leave behind for me the observation: “Quite a day to be going places, ain’t it.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  It couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes after we left my father, though, when Stanley reined his horse off the trail into a little clearing and the pack horses followed. When I rode up alongside he said: “I got to go visit a tree. You keep on ahead, Jick. I’ll catch right up.”

  I had the trail to myself for the next some minutes. Just when I was about to rein around and see what had become of Stanley, the white of the sorrel’s blaze flashed into sight. “Be right there,” Stanley called, motioning me to ride on.

  But he caught up awfully gradually, and in fact must have made a second stop when I went out of sight around a switchback. And before long he was absent again. This time when he didn’t show up and didn’t show up, I halted Pony and waited. As I was about to go back and start a search, here Stanley came, calling out as before: “Be right there.”

  I began to wonder a bit. Not only had I been volunteered into this expedition by somebody other than myself, I sure as the devil had not signed on to lead it.

  So the next time Stanley lagged from sight, I was determined to wait until he was up with me. And as I sat there on Pony, firmly paused, I began to hear him long before I could see him.

  “My name, she is Pancho,

  I work on a rancho.

  I make a dollar a day.”

  Stanley’s singing voice surprised me, a clearer, younger tone than his raspy talk.

  So did his song.

  “I go to see Suzy,

  She’s got a doozy.

  Suzy take my dollar away.”

  When Stanley drew even with me, I still couldn’t see much of his eyes under the brim of the pulled-down hat, although I was studying pretty hard this time.

  “Yessir,” Stanley announced as the sorrel stopped, “great day for the race, ain’t it?”

  “The race?” I gaped.

  “The human race.” Stanley pivoted in his saddle—a little unsteadily, I thought—enough to scan at the black pack mare and then the gray one. He got a white-eyed glower in return from the gray. “Bubbles there is still in kind of an owly mood. Mad because he managed to only kick my hand instead of my head, most likely. You’re doing fine up ahead, Jick. I’ll wander along behind while Bubbles works on being crabby.”

  There was nothing for it but head up the trail again. At least now I knew for sure what my situation was. If there lingered any last least iota of doubt, Stanley’s continued disappearances and his ongoing croon dispatched it.

  “My brother is Sancho,

  he try with a banjo

  to coax Suzy to woo.”

  I have long thought that the two commonest afflictions in Montana—it may be true everywhere, but then I haven’t been everywhere—are drink and orneriness. True, my attitude has thawed somewhat since I have become old enough to indulge in the pair myself now and again. But back there on that mountain those years ago, all I could think was that I had on my hands the two worst of such representations, a behind-the-bush bottle tipper and a knot-headed pack horse.

  “But she tell him no luck,

  the price is an extra buck,

  him and the banjo make two.”

  I spent a strong hour or so in contemplation of my father and just what he had saddled me with here. All the while mad enough to bite sticks in two. Innocent as a goddamn daisy, I had let my father detour me up the trail with Stanley Meixell. And now to find that my trail compadre showed every sign of being a warbling boozehound. Couldn’t I, for Christ’s sake, be told the full extent of the situation before I was shoved into it? What was in the head of that father of mine? Anything?

  After this siege of black mull, a new thought did break through. It occurred to me to wonder just how my father ought to have alerted me to Stanley’s condition beforehand. Cleared his throat and announced, “Stanley, excuse us but Jick and I got something to discuss over here in the jackpines, we’ll be right back”? Worked his way behind Stanley and pantomimed to me a swig from a bottle? Neither of those seemed what could be called etiquette, and that left me with the perturbing suggestion that maybe it’d been up to me to see the situation for myself.

  Which gave me another hour or so of heavy chewing, trying to figure out how I was supposed to follow events that sprung themselves on me from nowhere. How do you brace for that, whatever age you are?

  • • •

  Canada Dan’s sheep were bunched in a long thick line against a stand of lodgepole pine. When we rode up a lot of blatting was going on, as if there was an uneasiness among them. A sheepherder who knows what he is doing in timber probably is good in open country too, but vice versa is not necessarily the case, and I remembered my father mentioning that Canada Dan had been herding over by Cut Bank, plains country. A herder new to timber terrain and skittish about it will dog the bejesus out of his sheep, keep the band tight together for fear of losing some. Canada Dan’s patch-marked sheepdog looked weary, panting, an
d I saw Stanley study considerably the way these sheep were crammed along the slope.

  “Been looking for you since day before yesterday,” Canada Dan greeted us. “I’m goddamn near out of canned milk.”

  “That so?” said Stanley. “Lucky thing near isn’t the same as out.”

  Canada Dan was looking me up and down now. “You that ranger’s kid?”

  I didn’t care for the way that was put, and just said back: “Jick McCaskill.” Too, I was wondering how many more times that day I was going to need to identify myself to people I’d had no farthest intention of getting involved with.

  Canada Dan targeted on Stanley again. “Got to bring a kid along to play nursemaid for you now, Stanley? Must be getting on in years.”

  “I bunged up my hand,” Stanley responded shortly. “Jick’s been generous enough to pitch in with me.”

  Canada Dan shook his head as if my sanity was at issue. “He’s gonna regret charity when he sees the goddamn chore we got for ourselves up here.”

  “What would that be, Dan?”

  “About fifteen head of goddamn dead ones, that’s what. They got onto some deathcamas, maybe three days back. Poisoned theirselfs before you can say sic ’em.” Canada Dan reported all this as if he was an accidental passerby instead of being responsible for these animals. Remains of animals, they were now.

  “That’s a bunch of casualties,” Stanley agreed. “I didn’t happen to notice the pelts anywhere there at the wag—”

  “Happened right up over here,” Canada Dan went on as if he hadn’t heard, gesturing to the ridge close behind him. “Just glommed onto that deathcamas like it was goddamn candy. C’mon here, I’ll show you.” The herder shrugged out of his coat, tossed it down on the grass, pointed to it and instructed his dog: “Stay, Rags.” The dog came and lay on the coat, facing the sheep, and Canada Dan trudged up the ridge without ever glancing back at the dog or us.

  I began to dread the way this was trending.

  The place Canada Dan led us to was a pocket meadow of bunch grass interspersed with cream-colored blossoms and with gray mounds here and there on it. The blossoms were deathcamas, and the mounds were the dead ewes. Even as cool as the weather had been they were bloated almost to bursting.

  “That’s them,” the herder identified for our benefit. “It’s sure convenient of you fellows to show up. All this goddamn skinning, I can stand all the help I can get.”

  Stanley did take the chance to get a shot in on him. “You been too occupied the past three days to get to them, I guess?” But it bounced off Canada Dan like a berry off a buffalo.

  The three of us looked at the corpses for a while. There’s not all that much conversation to be made about bloated sheep carcasses. After a bit, though, Canada Dan offered in a grim satisfied way: “That’ll teach the goddamn buggers to eat deathcamas.”

  “Well,” Stanley expounded next, “there’s no such thing as one-handed skinning.” Which doubled the sense of dread in me. I thought to myself, But there is one-handed tipping of a bottle, and one-handed dragging me into this campjack expedition, and one-handed weaseling out of what was impending here next and—

  All this while, Stanley was looking off in some direction carefully away from me. “I can be unloading the grub into Dan’s wagon while this goes on, then come back with the mare so’s we can lug these pelts in. We got it to do.” We? “Guess I better go get at my end of it.”

  Stanley reined away, leading the pack horses toward the sheepwagon, and Canada Dan beaded on me. “Don’t just stand there in your tracks, kid. Plenty of these goddamn pelters for both of us.”

  So for the next long while I was delving in ewe carcasses. Manhandling each rain-soaked corpse onto its back, steadying it there, then starting in with that big incision from tail to jaw, which, if your jackknife slips just a little deep there at the belly, brings the guts pouring out onto your project. Slice around above all four hooves and then down the legs to the big cut, then skin out the hind legs and keep on trimming and tugging at the pelt, like peeling long underwear off somebody dead. It grudges me even now to say so, but Stanley was accurate, it did have to be done, because the pelts at least would bring a dollar apiece for the Busby brothers and a dollar then was still worth holding in your hand. That it was necessary did not make it less snotty a job, though. I don’t know whether you have ever skinned a sheep which has lain dead in the rain for a few days, but the clammy wet wool adds into the situation the possibility of the allergy known as wool poisoning, so that the dread of puffed painful hands accompanies all your handling of the pelt. That and a whole lot else on my mind, I slit and slit and slit, straddled in there over the bloated bellies and amid the stiffened legs. I started off careful not to work fast, in the hope that Canada Dan would slice right along and thereby skin the majority of the carcasses. It of course turned out that his strategy was identical and that Canada Dan had had countless more years of practice at being slow than I did. In other circumstances I might even have admired the drama in the way he would stop often, straighten up to ease what he told me several times was the world’s worst goddamn crick in his back, and contemplate my scalpel technique skeptically before finally bending back to his own. Out of his experience my father always testified that he’d rather work any day with sheepherders than cowboys. “You might come across a herder that’s loony now and then, but at least they aren’t so apt to be such self-inflated sonsabitches.” Right about now I wondered about that choice. If Canada Dan was anywhere near representative, sheepherders didn’t seem to be bargains of companionship either.

  Finally I gave up on trying to outslow Canada Dan and went at the skinning quick as I could, to get it over with.

  Canada Dan’s estimate of fifteen dead ewes proved to be eighteen. Also I noticed that six of the pelts were branded with a bar above the lamb number, signifying that the ewe was a mother of twins. Which summed out to the fact that besides the eighteen casualties, there were two dozen newly motherless lambs who would weigh light at shipping time.

  This came to Stanley’s attention too when he arrived back leading the black pack mare and we—or rather I, because Stanley of course didn’t have the hand for it and Canada Dan made no move toward the task whatsoever—slung the first load of pelts onto the pack saddle. “Guess we know what all that lamb blatting’s about, now,” observed Stanley. Canada Dan didn’t seem to hear this, either.

  Instead he turned and was trudging rapidly across the slope toward his sheepwagon. He whistled the dog from his coat and sent him policing after a few ewes who had dared to stray out onto open grass, then yelled back over his shoulder to us: “It’s about belly time. C’mon to the wagon when you get those goddamn pelts under control, I got us a meal fixed.”

  I looked down at my hands and forearms, so filthy with blood and other sheep stuff I didn’t even want to think about that I hated to touch the reins and saddlehorn to climb onto Pony. But climb on I did, for it was inevitable as if Bible-written that now I had to ride in with Stanley to the sheepwagon, unload these wet slimy pelts because he wasn’t able, ride back out with him for the second batch, load them, ride back in and unload—seeing it all unfold I abruptly spoke out: “Stanley!”

  “Yeah, Jick?” The brown Stetson turned most of the way in my direction.

  All the ways to say what I intended to competed in my mind. Stanley, this just isn’t going to work out. . . . Stanley, this deal was my father’s brainstorm and not mine; I’m heading down that trail for home. . . . Stanley, I’m not up to—to riding herd on you and doing the work of this wampus cat of a sheepherder and maybe getting wool poisoning and— But when my mouth did move I heard it mutter:

  “Nothing, I guess.”

  After wrestling the second consignment of pelts into shelter under Canada Dan’s sheepwagon I went up by the door to wash. Beside the basin on the chopping block lay a sliver of gray soap, which proved to be so coarse my skin nearly grated off along with the sheep blood and other mess. But I at least felt sco
ured fairly clean.

  “Is there a towel?” I called into the sheepwagon with what I considered a fine tone of indignation in my voice.

  The upper part of Canada Dan appeared at the dutch door. “Right there in front of your face.” He pointed to a gunny sack hanging from a corner of the wagon. “Your eyes bad?”

  I dried off as best I could on the burlap, feeling now as if I’d been rasped from elbow to fingertip, and swung on into the sheepwagon.

  The table of this wagon was a square of wood about the size of a big checkerboard, which pulled out from under the bunk at the far end and then was supported by a gate leg which folded down, and Stanley had tucked himself onto the seat on one side of our dining site. Canada Dan as cook and host I knew would need to be nearest the stove and sit on a stool at the outside end of the table, so I slid into the seat opposite Stanley, going real careful because three people in a sheepwagon is about twice too many.

  “KEEYIPE!” erupted from under my inmost foot, about the same instant my nose caught the distinctive smell of wet dog warming up.

  “Here now, what the hell kind of manners is that, walking on my dog? He does that again, Rags, you want to bite the notion right out of him.” This must have been Canada Dan’s idea of hilarity, for he laughed a little now in what I considered an egg-sucking way.

  Or it may simply have been his pleasure over the meal he had concocted. Onto the table the herder plunked a metal plate with a boiled chunk of meat on it, then followed that with a stained pan of what looked like small mothballs.

  “Like I say, I figured you might finally show up today, so I fixed you a duke’s choice of grub,” he crowed. “Get yourselves started with that hominy.” Then, picking up a hefty butcher knife, Canada Dan slabbed off a thickness of the grayish greasy meat and toppled it aside. “You even got your wide choice of meat. Here’s mutton.”

  He sliced off another slab. “Or then again here’s growed-up lamb.”

  The butcher knife produced a third plank-thick piece. “Or you can always have sheep meat.”